The RAMAC 350 was limited to government and industrial uses, and it was obsolete by 1969. This, of course, is the size of an average 128Kbps MP3 file today, stored in the physical space that could hold two commercial refrigerators. There are well-known photos of the IBM 650 RAMAC hard drive from 1956 that used 50 24-inch-wide platters to hold a whopping 3.75MB of storage space. Hard drive technology is relatively ancient (in terms of computer history, anyway).
External drives come in both large desktop and compact portable form factors, and SSDs are gradually becoming a larger part of the external-drive market. Note: We'll be talking primarily about internal drives in this story, but almost everything applies to external drives as well. See our picks for the best M.2 SSDs and get much more info on these multifaceted types of SSDs.) (These board-mounted SSDs use a form factor known as M.2. While they can take the place of traditional 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch hard drive bays, they can also be installed in a PCI Express expansion slot or even be mounted directly on the motherboard, a configuration that's now common in high-end laptops and all-in-ones. Like thumb drives, though, SSDs are often much smaller than HDDs and therefore offer manufacturers more flexibility in designing a PC. ( See our deep-dive guide to SSD jargon.) SSDs are consequently more expensive than USB thumb drives of the same capacities. These flash chips (often dubbed "NAND") are of a different type than the kind used in USB thumb drives, and are typically faster and more reliable. A read/write head on an arm accesses the data while the platters are spinning.Īn SSD performs the same basic function as a hard drive, but data is instead stored on interconnected flash-memory chips that retain the data even when there's no power flowing through them. A hard drive is essentially a metal platter with a magnetic coating that stores your data, whether weather reports from the last century, a high-definition copy of the original Star Wars trilogy, or your digital music collection. That is, information on it doesn't "go away" when you turn off the system, unlike data stored in RAM. The traditional spinning hard drive is the basic non-volatile storage on a computer.
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